Photographer, Gemma Warren.

Cai.ro’s quintet of band members are relaxing in a shady corner secluded from the picnic-blanket patchwork that is Trinity Bellwoods park on a long weekend. Condensation drips down the melting rainbow-coloured slushies that dot the grass between them — props from their photo shoot that wrapped up minutes before.

It may have been Craigslist that brought this five-piece to fruition, but it’s their musical chemistry that has landed them upcoming gigs like Toronto’s NXNE festival and the Steam Whistle Unsigned showcase. Cai.ro is the brainchild of lead singer and songwriter Nate Daniels, who scoured the internet for his bandmates, piecing them together one by one until he had the ideal ensemble.

“I met Matt first, and we had this cute little Tim Hortons date in Markham,” says Daniels, a quintessential indie frontman with a laid-back tonality and just-woke-up curls.

“We’ve all been on blind dates at some point,” laughs Matt Sullivan, who plays drums and percussion.

While the online dating approach is hit-and-miss, it’s flourished into a long-term relationship for Daniels, Sullivan, and their three bandmates, Dante Berardi Jr. (guitar and vocals), Wooyoung Kim (bass) and Caitlin Grieve (strings and vocals). They’ve drawn comparisons to indie chart-toppers like the Fleet Foxes, Gotye and Arcade Fire, but Cai.ro’s soundscape — layered with haunting vocals, catchy guitar riffs and symphonic instrumentals — is all their own. There’s just enough rawness woven into euphonic complexity, a trait that comes from the band members’ range of musical backgrounds, from classically trained to self-taught.

“It’s a clash of refinement meets purity,” says Sullivan. “But most of us know what we’re aiming for sonically. There’s a lot of shared tastes. ”

But a year playing back-to-back shows has taught them that those shared tastes don’t always extend to every crowd. The group laughs while recalling a Peterborough show from the past weekend, throughout which a slew of drunken construction workers heckled them to “play some Led Zeppelin.” Hecklers may be the bane of the undiscovered artist, but Cai.ro played off their not-so-sympathetic crowd, joking with the rowdy spectators.

“You’ve got to just have fun with it,” says Berardi.

It seems to be Cai.ro’s unspoken mantra. The band members toss around inside jokes like they’ve grown up together. They repeatedly veer off-topic on tangents ranging from the mystery that is the appeal of dubstep to forming a soccer-baseball team to whether the Shazam song-identification app will be able to find their album. There’s no doubt a correlation between their melodic chemistry and the bond that has formed while the microphones were switched off.

It’s the kind of quality that gets attention, even as a little fish in the big pond of Toronto up-and-comers. More than one audience member has been overheard uttering the collective sentiment that hangs in the air following a Cai.ro performance: “Why aren’t they signed?”

“There’s an over-saturation of mediocrity in Toronto,” says Sullivan. “It’s a sea of so-so. But at the same time, it’s the biggest challenge. It’s a little more frustrating, but when the little things happen, it makes them all the more meaningful.”

Those little things, like words of encouragement via Twitter or their CD release party at the Horseshoe Tavern selling out, are what keep Cai.ro on the right track. They have yet to be swallowed up by the “hype machine” Berardi calls the Toronto music scene, and hope to continue playing intimate shows for their rapidly swelling fan base.

The punctuation in their title may have been out of necessity (a little-known 80’s band had snatched up the name,

and period that separates the syllables was inserted for legal reasons), but like the band’s standard creative process while piecing a song together, naming the band was equal parts organic collaboration and complete fluke.

“It was kind of a slip of the tongue,” says Berardi. “While we were trying to come up with a cohesive name to represent the sound, someone had mentioned an artist named ‘Caro’ and we heard the word ‘Cairo.’ It’s a rare thing to get five people to agree on one thing, and with this there was a kind of resounding energy around the name.”

With back-to-back shows lined up all summer long, they hope that energy will continue to resonate with Toronto audiences. While they admit to complaining about their jam-packed schedule, one thing that all five can agree on is that they’d be far more frustrated if it were ever empty — not that there are too many empty calendar squares in the cards for Cai.ro if they keep producing the same caliber of passion-infused anthems.

“I’ve worked in so many different fields in my life and none of them make me happy. I’ll either starve to death or play music,” says Daniels. He breaks into a half-smile and shrugs. “I figured music might be the better of the two.”